“Is the truth trapped behind iron lock and key?
Have you buried all the evidence of what you used to be?”

Rocket finds prolific genre experimenter Alex G melding styles that range from Americana (‘Bobby’, ‘Powerful Man’), ambient folk (‘Witch’), indie rock (‘Proud’), autotune R&B (‘Sportstar’), and folk jazz (‘County’, ‘Guilty’), to whatever adjectives you’d use to describe Animal Collective (‘Horse’), Califone (‘Poison Root’), and Death Grips (‘Brick’). His creative process is at once mysterious, unfussy, and intimate, even as he welcomes collaborators into his bedroom studio for the first time. Though the album as a whole is as incoherent as an existential nihilist passionately arguing that nothing really matters, jumping between musical ideas, emotional extremes, perspectives, and vivid narratives without much rhyme or reason, many of the songs themselves, taken as little standalone artistic statements, feel fresh and diverse. It’s as if the songwriter threw his iPod on shuffle and listened until he found something that stirred his creative juices, then opened his laptop and ad libbed a song in that style with the natural skills of an autodidact. Few artists have songs this diverse in their entire catalogs, let alone snuggled up next to one another on an album. “I play how I wanna play, I say what I wanna say,” he sings on ‘Sportstar’, and then lives out that motto across the album. It takes an awful lot of talent and versatility to be so convincing a chameleon, and it’s no crime that some disguises are more convincing than others.